I'm about to go to Pycon, and while I have my hosting at Webfaction one of the tutorials (JKM) asks for students to have AWS instances. I've been trying to figure out what some minimum charge examples might look like? I'll have a lamp server with Django and a requisite amount of storage but next to no traffic.
Anyone have some guidance/advice? My Google searches and look here did not turn up much useful info.
It depends on how long you need to run your instance. A small linux instance will cost 8.5 cents per hour. If you spend a week at Pycon and have your instance running the entire week, it would cost $14.28 for the week. You probably won't need it while you are asleep, so you can turn it off when you are done each day. If you only need it for an hour it will cost you 8.5 cents.
Here's more details on the pricing if you need a bigger server or you need a windows server instead:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing
I think the AWS calculator might help also for estimating cost.
See http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
Also try here for a comparison of various different on-demand services (plus rough calculations of how much it would cost to roll it yourself): https://secure.slicify.com/Calculator.aspx
(full disclosure - it's a page on my site).
Related
I've been trying to wrap my head around the best solution for hosting development sites for our company lately.
To be completely frank I'm new to AWS and it's architecture, so more then anything I just want to know if I should keep learning about it, or find another more suitable solution.
Right now we have a dedicated server which hosts our own website, our intranet, and a lot of websites we've developed for clients.
Our own web and the intranet isn't an issue, however I'm not quite sure about the websites we produced for our clients.
There are about 100 of them right now, these sites are only used pre-launch so our clients can populate the sites with content. As soon as the content is done we host the website somewhere else. And the site that is still on our developer server is no longer used at all, but we keep them there if the client wants a new template/function so we can show it there before sending it to production.
This means the development sites have almost zero traffic, with perhaps at most 5 or so people adding content to them at any given time (5 people for all 100 sites, not 5 per site).
These sites needs to be available at all times, and should always feel snappy.
These are not static sites, they all require a database connection.
Is AWS (ES2, or any other kind of instance, lightsail?) a valid solution for hosting these sites. Or should I just downgrade our current dedicated server to a VPS, and just worry about hosting our main site on AWS?
I'll put this in an answer because it's too long, but it's just advice.
If you move those sites to AWS you're likely to end up paying (significantly) more than you do now. You can use the Simple Monthly Calculator to get an idea.
To clarify, AWS is cost-effective for certain workloads. It is cost effective because it can scale automatically when needed so you don't have to provision for peak traffic all the time. And because it's easy to work with, so it takes fewer people and you don't have to pay a big ops team. It is cost effective for small teams that want to run production workloads with little operational overhead, up to big teams that are not yet big enough to build their own cloud.
Your sites are development sites that just sit there and see very little activity. Which means those sites are probably under the threshold of cost effective.
You should clarify why you want to move. If the reason is that you want as close to 100% uptime as possible, then AWS is a good choice. But it will cost you, both in terms of bill paid to Amazon and price of learning to set up such infrastructure. If cost is a primary concern, you might want to think it over.
That said, if your requirements for the next year or more are predictable enough and you have someone who knows what they are doing in AWS, there are ways to lower the cost, so it might be worth it. But without further detail it's hard for anyone to give you a definitive answer.
However. You also asked if you should keep learning AWS. Yes. Yes, you should. If not AWS, one of the other major clouds. Cloud and serverless[1] are the future of much of this industry. For some that is very much the present. Up to you if you start with those dev sites or something else.
[1] "Serverless" is as misleading a name as NoSQL. It doesn't mean no servers.
Edit:
You can find a list of EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) instance types here. That's CPU and RAM. Realistically, the cheapest instance is about $8 per month. You also need storage, which is called EBS (Elastic Block Store). There are multiple types of that too, you probably want GP2 (General Purpose SSD).
I assume you also have one or more databases behind those sites. You can either set up the database(s) on EC2 instance(s), or use RDS (Relational Database Service). Again, multiple choices there. You probably don't want Multi-AZ there for dev. In short, Multi-AZ means two RDS instances so that if one crashes the other one takes over, but it's also double the price. You also pay for storage there, too.
And, depending on how you set things up you might pay for traffic. You pay for traffic between zones, but if you put everything in the same zone traffic is free.
Storage and traffic are pretty cheap though.
This is only the most basic of the basics. As I said, it can get complicated. It's probably worth it, but if you don't know AWS you might end up paying more than you should. Take it slow and keep reading.
The company which I work right now planning to use AWS to host a new website for a client. Their old website had roughly 75,000 sessions and 250,000 page views per year. We haven't used AWS before and I need to give a rough cost estimate to my project manager.
This new website is going to be mostly content-driven with a cms backend (probably WordPress) + a cost calculator for their services. Can anyone give me a rough idea about the cost to host such kind of a website in aws?
I have used simple monthly calculator with a single Linux t2.small 3 Year upfront which gave me around 470$.
(forgive my English)
The only way to know the cost is to know the actual services you will consume (Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, database, etc). It is not possible to give an accurate "guess" of these requirements because it really does depend upon the application and usage patterns.
It is normally recommended that you implement the system and run it for a while before committing to Reserved Instances so that you have a chance to measure performance and test a few different instance types.
Be careful using T2 instances for production workloads. They are very powerful instances, but if the CPU Credits run out, the amount of CPU is limited.
Bottom line: Implement, measure, test. Then you'll know what is right for your needs.
Take Note
When you are new in AWS you have a 1 year free tier on a single t2.micro
Just pulled it out, looking into your requirement you may not need this
One load balancer and App server should be fine (Just use route53 to serve some static pages from s3 while upgrading or scalling )
Use of email subscription and processing of Some document can be handled with AWS Lambda, SNS and SWQ which may further reduce the cost ( you may reduce the server size and do all the hevay lifting from Lambda)
A simple webpage with 3000 request/monthly can be handled by T2 micro which is almost free for one year as mentioned above in the note
You don't have a lot of details in your question. AWS has a wide variety of services that you could be using in that scenario. To accurately estimate costs, you should gather these details:
What will the AWS storage be used for? A database, applications, file storage?
How big will the objects be? Each type of storage has different limits on individual file size, estimate your largest object size.
How long will you store these objects? This will help you determine static, persistent or container storage.
What is the total size of the storage you need? Again, different products have different limits.
How often do you need to do backup snapshots? Where will you store them?
Every cloud vendor has a detailed calculator to help you determine costs. However, to use them effectively you need to have all of these questions answered and you need to understand what each product is used for. If you would like to get a quick estimate of costs, you can use this calculator by NetApp.
I'm trying to make a rough estimate to how much it would cost per hour when running a web application within AWS. I understand that this depends on the type of web application, network capacity, throughput etc. Very roughly, how many concurrent sessions can a medium or large server manage? Let's say that the number of clients is at any time 8000 - roughly, what would that cost?
Thank you!
Nobody can answer your question asked like that. A rough estimate can be between 10 and 10k USD. What I suggest is to use the AWS calculator to calculate your estimate. Add some EC2 machines, and transfer out, and you should see some kind of estimate.
https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
You'll have to excuse my ignorance on this one...but honestly, I've had a hard time finding clarity on this. That being said, I'm looking for a non technical answer...something in layman's terms!
Anyways, I've been playing around building a web app (first time obviously) and I'm getting to the point where I've started looking into hosting services. A quick google search and a few blogs later, I thought AWS would be a good place to start, since they give a free-year trial. I don't care about speedy upstarts or other hosting serves, so save your key strokes on offering other services.
My question is based on the fact that AWS charges "Linux Usage per hour" and they also use this term "instance". Yeah...an "instance" is an "object", which is also above my head (probably the real source of the problem), but that was the extent I was able to learn via a google search. That being said, I don't know how to translate the cost into a ball park cost. Yes, I can probably use the trial to help monitor predictable costs, but I don't want to go through the effort of learning one hosting companies system just to find out it's not going to work in the end.
OK...so hopefully by now you see where I'm coming from. What is an "instance" and how do I use the "Linux Usage per hour" to estimate cost? Is an instance a server? For example if I start NGINX is that in instance? Is it just one instance running NGINX or does every VPN represent an instance? If I have 100 people calling the server at once, can they fit on one instance? If I start another server say, Apache or Node, does that become another instance? If I connect to a database, is that an instance? Do instances start as needed? Yes, I know, that's more than one question...I'm just trying to express my confusion.
If I'm suppose to choose a pricing model from this list, "Linux Usage per hour", I need to know what them mean by "Linux Usage". If it's based on an "instance", I need to know what that is. So please, in layman's terms, help clear this up. Maybe some examples or analogies, but no deep technical stuff.
This is more a side note, but I was reading this article and it said
For a client needing to run 800 virtual instances, the annual cost of
a private cloud came to below $400,000 vs. somewhere between $800,000
and $1.2 million for public cloud services.
Considering I don't know what an instance is, that kinda made me a bit nervous...WAAAAAAyyyyyy outta my price range! Yes, it's obviously a big company, but can you imagine "hitting the lottery" with an app everyone loves then before you know it, AWS hits you with a bill of $1,000,000. Or even worse, your security sucks and someone spawns millions of these "instances"...help alive my paranoia!!
Basically, an instance is a virtual machine, which looks very much like a server. As such it's running an operating system - e.g. linux - which is capable of running many programs (aka 'processes' or sometimes, 'services') at the same time.
To go through your questions (some of the explanations below are not technically accurate, but are hopefully more explanatory for it - if anything is obvious or already known, apologies - trying not to assume any knowledge)
An instance is an object
This definition is coming up in your searches because 'instance' has many definitions in different situations. If you see the definition of 'instance' as an object, it's from the topic of object oriented programming languages - you define a class in your code (kind of like a 'template'), and then create instances of the class - kind of like real copies of the template.
Amazon borrowed the term to be analogous - because in the 'cloud' world, you can create an AMI (Amazon Machine Image - the template) and then create lots of instances that are copies or clones of that template.
Is an instance a server?
In terms of what you can do with it, yes, it's a server.
(Technically it's a virtual server - Amazon runs multiple virtual servers on each physical server.)
how do I use the "Linux Usage per hour" to estimate cost?
Estimate how long you will have your instance running for in hours per month, multiply it by cost per hour and you will have your estimated cost per instance per month.
e.g. - one instance always turned on would be - 24 hrs * 31 days = 744 hours. At $0.013/hr (for a t2.micro) that would be 744 * $0.013 = $9.672/mth.
(And that's the reason the free tier gives you 750 hours of instance time per month.)
Instances come in different types and sizes and each size costs a different amount. If you are not sure what size you need, I'd start with the smallest until you discover you need more - which would be when your program starts running too slowly.
For example if I start NGINX is that in instance?
Nginx is a program that runs as a daemon in linux terms - a program that runs in the background so it's always on. It will be one of the many programs running on the server (aka the instance)
If I have 100 people calling the server at once, can they fit on one instance?
It depends - on how big your instance is, and how efficient the program is that is responding to their requests. If you are just getting started learning to program websites, I wouldn't worry about handling 100 people issuing requests to the server all at once just yet - walk before you run :) (also, even when there are 100 people visiting your website, the odds that all of them issue a request at exactly the same time is low - usually they load a page and read it - while they're reading it, some of the other people are loading other pages, and it all spreads out so you might only have ~10 page requests actively being processed by your server at the same time.)
However, if you have 2,000 people on your site at the same time, you might be processing 200 page requests at once, so by then you do need to have put some thought into performance and scalability.
(Note: these numbers are arbitrary and depend entirely on the type of site and it's traffic patterns.)
Generally, most websites pick a mid-level instance size, and then to handle more requests they 'scale out' - create lots of copies of that instance, and allow each instance to handle a portion of the traffic.
If I start another server say, Apache or Node, does that become another instance
The language to use here would be 'start another service say, Apache or Node' - they are other programs, and your instance will be perfectly fine running nginx, apache and node all at the same time. Although each will consume some of the resources (e.g. memory and cpu) and the more activity they are doing, the faster you will run out of resources and need to get a bigger instance size
So - no, they don't automatically become another instance. The language is confusing because sometimes people don't distinguish between the 'server' (aka the instance) and the service (aka the program) and will say the 'apache server' and the 'apache service' interchangably.
If I connect to a database, is that an instance?
Your instance, as a fully capable server, could run a database service on it at the same time as the other services - e.g. you could install and run mysql on your instance.
There is another option, though - if you use the AWS RDS product, then you will be starting an RDS instance. An RDS instance is different from an EC2 instance (what we've been talking about so far) in that RDS instances are specialised to just run the database service and nothing else, but EC2 instances are general servers that you can do pretty much anything on.
It's usually recommended to use RDS, but if you are trying to save money and aren't serving many users, there's nothing particularly wrong with installing mysql on your instance yourself (especially while you're learning how it works) and then moving your data to an RDS instance when you want to support more load or traffic.
Do instances start as needed?
Not by default, no - you have to manually start and stop them.
However, there are options other than manually starting and stopping. Amazon provides a lot of APIs, so you could write a program that would connect to the API and automatically start and stop your instance(s) based on rules you build into your program..
Also, Amazon offers a product called "AutoScalingGroups" which allows you to have a related group of instances and for Amazon to automatically start and stop them according to rules that you configure into that product. These rules can be 'scheduled actions' - start/stop at certain times of day - or they can be reactive - e.g. when the average CPU usage is > 50% for more than 5 minutes, start another instance.
This is more a side note, but I was reading this article and it said
For a client needing to run 800 virtual instances, the annual cost of
a private cloud came to below $400,000 vs. somewhere between $800,000
and $1.2 million for public cloud services.
The 'free tier' gives you a t2.micro sized instance (1 vCPU, 1 GiB RAM) which you could leave turned on permanently for free during that free year.
Even after your free tier expires, that same instance would cost you $9.67/mth, and you have the option to go downgrade to a t2.nano (0.5 GiB RAM) which would only cost ~$4/mth - but 0.5GiB RAM isn't much these days, so may not be enough for you.
A t2.micro should be more than enough to learn how to build websites on. If you are fortunate enough to build a site that is popular enough that you are getting more requests than that server can handle, then you will have to decide if you can generate revenue from that popularity sufficient to cover the cost, but by then you'll have more of a sense of how efficient your program is, and what instance size (and/or how many instances) you'll need.
Yes, it's obviously a big company, but can you imagine "hitting the
lottery" with an app everyone loves then before you know it, AWS hits
you with a bill of $1,000,000
AWS protects you from yourself here a bit - they have limits which generally restrict you from running more than 20 instances at a time - unless you ask for permission. So, by default, your instance won't go multiplying like rabbits on it's own - unless you set it up to. And even if you have set it up to, it won't be able to grow beyond 20 instances unless you have asked amazon to let you. So, worst case is 20 x $9.67/mth - $197/mth.
But - that's just the instance cost. Amazon charges you for lots of things including data traffic in and out, RDS instance costs, and if you start using other service such as S3 buckets and/or elastic load balancers, they all attract their own costs.
But hopefully, if you hit the lottery with an app everyone loves, you've worked out how to convert that love into dollars and cents so you can pay for all those instances you're going to need :)
I am thinking of hosting Rhodecode for my version control of all my codes on Amazon EC2. Is that the good idea.
if that works i may also host Confluence on there as well
How much resources will it consume.
I am not able to calculate the CPUS thing. Dont know how that works
If i will only be pushing code one per day . do my cpu will be billed for 1 hour for month
RhodeCode is hungry for ressources since it’s really doing a lot of heavy work. EC2 I would not recommend for this since you will need to order at least a large instance which costs est. $175 per month!
Also other cloud providers are not really cheaper and you don’t even have a highly available setup, yet. For a professional setup you would need to budget at least $300-$400 per month on dedicated hardware.
The most cost-efficient and quick solution would be to use the new Hosted RhodeCode service at rhodecode.com.
Currently the site is in private beta but you can request an invite and try it out for free. After private beta, the first users will be free of charge and any further user will cost a low USD amount per month.
Disclaimer: I am CEO at RhodeCode and my co-founder Marcin is the creator of RhodeCode SCM. You can contact me at anytime for any question through Twitter #RhodeCode or email (support # ourdomain).